The European Space Agency ’s Juice delegacy is on its way to explore Jupiter ’s icy moonshine , come in a few years , but to get there it ’s steal some orbital velocity from Earth , Venus , and – for the first time – the Moon . These gravitational assist maneuvers are standard to slingshot missions about the Solar System but what JUICE did last nighttime , and is about to do tonight , is anything but .
For the first prison term , a spacecraft is using two objects for a gravity assistance maneuver alternatively of just one . This is the first - everlunar - Earth flyby , carried out over two nights . It is such a daring maneuver that it required the launch windowpane for the mission last class to be only 1 second long . Last dark Juice successfully flew by the Moon , conducting some tests of the science instruments , include the ones that will study what ’s underneath the polar outside of the Jovian Moon , and in the second leg , it will fly by Earth tonight .
“ This could not be done in the lab . This will be an fantabulous run to tick off the performance of the radio detection and ranging in the setting of the full spacecraft operate , ” Nicolas Altobelli , planetary scientist with ESA , said during a press conference attend by IFLScience 10 days ago .
The Moon captured by JUICE at 9:25 pm UTC on 7 February 2025, soon after its closest approach to the Moon.Image credit: ESA/JUICE/JMC, acknowledgments: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughrean
While most of the focus is on the scientific discipline , the television camera will also be test . Several images have already been deal online , with a few that have been lightly processed such as the primary image above to show real color deviation on the Moon .
This double was not actually taken by the proper scientific tv camera . It comes from the Juice Monitoring Camera , which is used to check out the status of the booms and antennae .
The ballistic capsule will fly by Earth in just a few hours and that will put it on the correct trajectory to go towards Venus , which it will reach in August 2025 . It will then follow back to Earth double in September 2026 for more gravitative assists and then again in January 2029 .
All the flybys will allow the speed to hit Jupiter in 2031 , where Juice will read the system as a whole and Europa , Ganymede , and Callisto for three days , before orbiting Ganymede alone .
